The Calder Foundation partners with luxury Italian textile house Gentili Mosconi to bring Alexander Calder’s ink ‘cartoon’ from 1949 to life in wearable form.
Alexander Calder transformed the landscape of art with his contributions to sculpture, redefining the traditionally static medium with his kinetic constructions of suspended, abstract forms. He is renowned for his invention of the mobile—a term coined by Marcel Duchamp—in 1931. Rejecting hierarchies of material, Calder used industrial media including wire and sheet metal in his compositional investigations of matter, line and space.
Calder made a diverse range of paintings and drawings and, very occasionally, created designs for textiles. This particular untitled ‘cartoon’ was designed in 1949 for production as a silk scarf that was, however, never realized during the artist’s lifetime. This collaboration has afforded Permanent Collection the opportunity to bring Calder’s original vision to fruition. Located in the small town of Casnate con Bernate near Como, Gentili Mosconi specializes in nuanced, highly faithful textile printing and refined, luxury silks.
